


lonely nights, emptied thoughts

by rryoutah



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Confession, First Kiss, Fluff, Introspection, M/M, Self-Indulgent, Swearing, pynchweek, pynchweek16
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-08-08 13:25:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7759480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rryoutah/pseuds/rryoutah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ronan thinks he’d be fine if he thought of Adam forever. First thought, last thought, any thought. It wouldn’t be a bad life to only ever think of Adam Parrish. </p>
<p>-</p>
<p>In which Ronan confesses to Adam.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lonely nights, emptied thoughts

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic for TRC (and my first fic for fandom in a very long time) and I thought pynchweek + my birthday (the 15th of August) would be a good place to begin writing fanfic again. I hope you enjoy! Feel free to point out any errors or give constructive criticism, I'd appreciate it. 
> 
> Written for pynchweek16.

**Lonely nights, emptied thoughts**

 

If, two years ago, you’d asked Ronan Lynch what the sensation of love was, he’d say: speed.

 

Being in a fast car, losing yourself to the blur of the outside world and the purr of an engine beneath your body—that was love.

 

Or at least, it gave him the sensation of love.

 

That’s what he’s doing on the seventh—or maybe it’s the eighth or ninth, because the last time he read a calendar was June and he never looks at his phone unless it makes a noise and even then it’s only a glance mixed with a scoff—speeding.

 

He speeds halfway through Henrietta, drives up the east coast, and would’ve fled into Maryland as well if it wasn’t for the eeriness of that one abandoned carpark that appealed to his sadistic side. He makes some swerve-y tattoos in the ground with the BMW’s tyres, and then wishes he had company when he comes to a stop near some shopping carts.

 

Thinking of said company is what makes him stay for longer than he’d like to admit. Even as his legs are still vibrating from the engine when he gets out of the car, he’s dying to get back in. Dying to get that simultaneous control and loss of it.

 

Instead, he gives himself a break. Settles himself on the front of the car, brings up a knee, and tangles his fingers behind his head. The car is hot; the sky is cold. An interesting combo of feelings that still couldn’t rival the ones in his own body.

 

He almost hates feelings. Thinks of them as a vulnerability, something to scoff at, something that makes him more permanent than perhaps he should be. Then he wonders what he’d be like without them.

 

An image of dragons floods into his mind.

 

But someone can have feelings and be reckless. He knows that.

 

He’s more attracted to the type who’s constantly solving other people’s feelings instead of his own, the type who’s responsible, not reckless. The type who believes he’s ugly and unknowable, but instead has beautiful hands, beautiful skin, and is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

 

Ronan’s face fills with heat. Nobody’d be able to tell under just the light of streetlights and the moon, and if they did, they’d pass it off as coldness or lack of warmth, but it still curdles some shame into his soul—if he has one. He knows, he knows. He shouldn’t be ashamed. There is nothing to be ashamed of. It still doesn’t stop his body from not catching up with his mind. Being in love is sometimes shameless, sometimes shameful. There isn’t much he can do about it. He has feelings. He’s human. Sort of. So what?

 

When he mixes up the stars for Adam’s freckles, and Adam’s freckles for the stars, he digs the heels of his palms into his eyes until his vision is a kaleidoscope of dreams and colours and cars. The huff his chest makes is visible in the air. He’s tired. But he can’t sleep.

 

When he sleeps, he dreams, but he’s not always dreaming when he sleeps.

 

Sometimes he’s thinking about secrets—the ones that are blissful, not bavardage.

 

Sometimes he’s thinking about what tattoo would piss his brother off next.

 

Right now, under a blanket of navy ink and stars and not even sleeping, he’s thinking about the blissful kind.

 

He’s thinking about his hands, the way his accent slips, the way his hair falls over his forehead. How he thinks he’s ugly, how Ronan walks on the right side of him, how his cheeks dimple when he smiles. Ronan thinks he’d be fine if he thought of Adam forever. First thought, last thought, any thought. It wouldn’t be a bad life to only ever think of Adam Parrish.

 

His lips have scabbed over twice from being chewed when he decides it’s too cold-as-balls to stay out on the car and pine over a boy he feels like he’s loved forever. What chance does he have if he gets stuck to the car, permanently frozen? Adam won’t want to fuck a popsicle.

 

The AC does nothing to heat his bones; that kind of warmth only comes from the drone of the engine and the decreasing gas pedal beneath his foot.

 

The BMW overlaps the skid marks already in place outside of St Agnes church. It’s not the first time this week that Ronan has showed up here, ready and rearing to spill his entire fucking soul to Adam Parrish only to go home more red-faced than he came, and not from embarrassment. He wonders, briefly as he climbs the stairs, if Adam hears the roaring of the BMW every night. He wonders if he laughs as he drives away. Ronan Lynch. Can’t confess his feelings. What a coward.

 

“Parrish.” He slams the door open.

 

“For fuck’s sake, Ronan.” Adam, without an ounce of hiding that full Henrietta accent, shoots up with his eyes in a squint and his mouth in a U-turn. “I should’a known that was you. Only you shut a door that hard.”

 

“Morning, sunshine.”

 

“Blankets are at the end of the bed.” Adam shuffles his shoulder back under his duvet and sleeps with his head on his forearm.

 

“I’m not here to sleep.”

 

“Then you can return at a normal hour.” Adam mumbles into the crook of his elbow.

 

“This is a normal hour. For me.”

 

“Then you can return at a normal hour. For me.” Adam repeats.

 

Ronan feels for Adam, he really does. If anyone needs sleep, it’s Adam. Ronan’s insomnia is eating him alive from the inside out and Gansey’s probably the same, but Adam still needs slumber more than any of them do. For a moment, he wonders if Adam’s insomnia would be different from theirs. They never lost out on sleep due to fear, or lack of safety. They had the luxury of lying in bed with their ears and analytical sides switched off, a complete relaxation whilst the night was dead. Adam didn’t have that. Adam relaxing, even the slightest, in that trailer could’ve ended up with him dead.

 

A thin stream of air goes into his lungs, but it feels like it never comes out. His chest is tight; his fingernails are curled into his palm. It’s been a long time, now. Adam would say it didn’t matter. But how dare. How _dare_ Robert Parrish—

 

“Seriously Ronan, just ‘cause you’re not going to classes doesn’t mean the rest of us have stopped.”

 

“Came to see you.” Ronan finally moves away from the door and swings it shut behind him. When it doesn’t click into the lock, he stretches his fingertips open until it does.

 

“’Kay.” Adam tells his pillow.

 

Ronan scoffs and pushes his foot against the mattress underneath Adam’s belly. His body shakes above the movement. “Fuck, Parrish, you don’t make this easy.”

 

Adam’s silent until he exhales with something like bitterness or tiredness or one of those breaths he makes when he’s thinking this is typical Ronan. He pushes himself up from his bed with both hands and turns himself onto his side, sitting on half his ass.

 

“Make what easy? What’s so important you can’t wait ‘til morning?”

 

Ronan grumbles under his breath. “You.”

 

Adam apparently doesn’t hear it. “I know it’s not an emergency otherwise you’d have actually used your phone.” His mannerisms start to overlap his natural accent as he wakens fully.

 

Even if Ronan didn’t spill his guts over Adam’s head tonight, at least he’d made it into his room and initiated conversation. Maybe that was better than nothing. Maybe that was nothing better than when he’d sat outside the church talking to the Adam in his head.

 

Ronan nods his chin towards the window. “What’s the weather like tomorrow?”

 

“Are you seriously trying to make small talk?”

 

“I thought we could go on a drive.” His thoughts were best unjumbled when speed was a factor.

 

“You’d go on a drive no matter the weather, Ronan.”

 

That was fair enough; he would.

 

“Have you fucked something up?”

 

“Nah.”

 

“Then tell me what you want. Faster you do, faster I can sleep.”

 

What he wants.

 

What he wants is simple and also complicated: love.

 

Not in the form of speed, not in a car, not in those dark, lonely nights that have him thinking of Adam and the way the sky could be on his face.

 

It’s simple because it’s love. Just love. He actually already has it, and gives it, and has experienced it.

 

It’s complicated because it’s romantic. He’s sure he’s felt something before, ages ago, maybe. Something less than love but more than romance. Now it’s more than love and more than romance and more than he can tolerate on his own.

 

What’s he scared of? That Adam will run away and reject him? Whatever. If he’s rejected, at least Parrish can use it as a compliment and stop thinking of himself as ugly.

 

“You can tell me to fuck off if you want.” Ronan toes the ground with his shoe and mumbles, probably quieter than Adam can hear at this time in the morning and considering he’s deaf in one ear.

 

“Right.” Adam acknowledges, still staring up at him from the bed, all innocent-eyed and sleepy. “I do want. It’s the middle of the night. But you’re making me curious, so I want to know why you’re here.”

 

Tightness overtakes Ronan’s throat, but he isn’t a liar. With his hands stuffed in his jean pockets, he sways around awkwardly until he dumps himself on the edge of Adam’s bed near his legs. Ever polite, Adam moves aside to give him more room, but Ronan’s fine with perching. He’s watched Chainsaw do it enough to become an expert on it.

 

Adam swaps leaning on his hand for sitting upright, bringing him closer to Ronan. His breath hits his cheekbone.

 

“Ronan.” The way Adam says his name is usually striking, but with that accent, it’s magnificent. It’s almost like he does it on purpose. Knows Ronan feels this way, knows Ronan is close to confessing, and so he breaks out his accent to weaken Ronan’s knees and turn him upside down and break him and bend him and burn him and spill his soul in front of him. Fuck every single action in his life that ever lead up to this moment, he’s in love with Adam.

 

“Parrish.” Ronan retorts. He says it in a way that passes the buck to Adam, makes him initiate the awkward conversation instead of him. Ronan knows that Adam knows. Adam can start this conversation if he wants to.

 

Their staring competition lasts only a matter of seconds before Adam breaks the gaze. It’s easier to look at his cheekbones than look into his soul.

 

“C’mere.” Ronan says, lifts his hand and traces that cheekbone with his thumb. He never thought he’d actually get to touch the sky.

 

Adam’s eyes flick back at him, down to his mouth, and then he curls his lips into his own mouth like he knows how Ronan’s telling his secret and he needs a mouth guard for it. When his lips come out of his mouth damper and he isn’t pulling away, Ronan knows it’s safe to continue. Knows Adam won’t run for the hills. Knows Adam won’t reject him.

 

Kissing Adam Parrish is much more than his dreams let him in on. It’s more than speed and more than cars and it’s love, love, love, and Ronan doesn’t stop for breath until he feels Adam’s hand on his face, fingertips curled at his neck. The pressure behind his mouth isn’t rejection, isn’t running. It’s love and it’s romance and it’s Adam Parrish, stripped and bared, and he feels this too.

 

His mouth is as dry as his hands, but Adam’s chapped lips are something manibus won’t fix. Until he can get home to dream, Ronan will soothe them with his lips and his tongue and his teeth. That’s if he doesn’t pass out from lack of oxygen first. The way Adam’s capable-of-anything hands run down the opposite of his spine, brush against his stomach and curl around his waist remove all air from his lungs in the most pleasant way.

 

They kiss, and kiss, and kiss, until Adam’s on his back and Ronan’s on his forearms above him and Ronan’s never loved the feeling of hands against his buzz cut so much in his life. He’ll never make it audible, never give it value with sound, but he’d give it all up for Adam Parrish. Cars, speed, engines, drives. It’s love. But it’s not Adam.

 

If, two years ago, you’d asked Ronan Lynch what the sensation of love was, he’d say: speed.

 

If, right now, you asked Ronan Lynch what the sensation of love was, he’d say: Adam. Adam Parrish.

**Author's Note:**

> You can also find me at thelaurentofvere.tumblr.com OR ackrmanns.tumblr.com : )


End file.
